AMD Brazos Platform Benchmarked – Zacate E-350 1.6GHz APU

Power Consumption & Blu-ray Playback

Since power consumption is important on a notebook we wanted to run some numbers, but how do you compare numbers from this system to anything else?

We don’t feel comfortable comparing a development platform to other notebooks that we have recently tested as the numbers just aren’t accurate. AMD has come out with a newer revision of the E-350 since we have tested it and our test platform had USB 3.0, Bluetooth and a bunch of other stuff enabled that won’t likely be on many of the notebooks that consumers get their hands on.

For load measurements, Prime95 was run on all cores to make sure each and every processor
was at 100% load. We also looked at Blu-Ray playback numbers and while playing the game title Star Craft II.

As you can see the power consumption numbers for this Brazos platform with the Zacate E-350 CPU is rather low. When multi-tasking and running numerous things at once we were able to see the system spike at just over 30 Watts, but for only a split second and 30.3W was the highest we saw. When playing games or watching a 1080P Blu-ray video we were hitting between 26-30W and that is pretty good seeing how we were told that power numbers would only get better.

We also ran the VC-1 Blu-ray MacGruber and MPEG-4 AVC title My Bloody Valentine on the Brazos platform. We found that the CPU usage average on MacGruber was around 54% and 45% on My Bloody Valentine. The MPEG-4 AVC title that we ran had some stuttering issues at time, but it was a Blu-ray 3D title and while we didn’t have a 3D monitor we expected it to work. AMD brought in some other MPEG-4 titles that worked fine, so it could have been an optical drive issue or something with that Blu-ray 3D title that didn’t play nice with the development platform. As you can see in the image above the power consumption level seen on the entire system on this scene of MacGruber was 28.4 Watts.

Since this is only a preview of the AMD Brazos platform and the Zacate APU we will let this article just abruptly end. We can’t wait to get our hands on some real-world notebooks that use this platform to see what the final product really looks like. This notebook platform could do pretty much anything we would want to do and if they can hit the sub $399 price point that is simply amazing. The amount of productivity that you can get from a platform like this is impressive.